Words and Thoughts of Joshua Scott Witsaman

Friday Funny Pages: Of Course

I have some really great panels coming up in this series, from a wide range of comic books and I have found that it is hard to choose which one to show when Friday morning comes around. I chose this one this week because it features the Silver Surfer, a favorite character of mine and comes from one of the classic, if not campy, early Marvel events the Avengers/Defenders War. Brought to you by Steve Englehart and Bob Brown the story is simple and reminiscent of many other Avengers tales. In this crossover spectacle Loki teams up with Dormammu and under competing false pretenses tricks both super hero teams into gathering the components of a device known as the Evil Eye which will allow Dormammu to expand his Dark Dimension and overtake our plane of existance.

This panel stuck out at me for several reasons. First the way the Silver Surfer is portrayed with that odd, goofy expression of surprise. Normally the Surfer is a very stoic, almost Spock-like character and he seems to only be drawn with the most extreme facial expressions in the pages of the comics. If he’s not blank faced and neutral he’s either completely mopy and sad or shocked and horrified. Here we of course have the latter. Second are just the snippets of dialogue in this panel, it just exemplifies the ridiculous situations inheirent in comic book stories. This panel deals with the Silver Surfer having no luck trying to find one of the parts of the Evil Eye on some remote island, until one of the natives asks if he is their volcano god. Bingo! Volcano! This leads to an awesome battle between the Silver Surfer and the Vision, representing the Defenders and the Avengers respectively, inside the crater of a volcano. Which of course could have all been avoided had the ol’ Silver Surfer just checked the volcano, as anyone would do when searching for a mystic weapon of mass destruction. Duh.